Texas Through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth-Century Experience (review)

Texans are proud of their history and happy to share it with the world. The Texas State Historical Association, founded in 1897, has a long list of publications and a scholarly journal. The Baylor University Institute for Oral History has been documenting Texas history since 1970. And in the past decade, more than 4000 books and almost 500 theses or dissertations cover Texas history, many from academic presses (WorldCat, viewed March 22, 2011). Despite the abundance of published literature, authors Judith N. McArthur and Harold L. Smith (University of Houston-Victoria) found one element missing—women. “Even conscientious readers can hardly avoid concluding that modern Texas women have no history to speak of, and that the twentieth century unfolded without women’s labor, civic engagement, social protest, and political organizing. Our aim, in historian Anne Firor Scott’s phrase, is to make the invisible woman visible” (xi).

The result, Texas through Women’s Eyes: The Twentieth-Century Experience, successfully addresses this gap. They organize the work into four sections, roughly corresponding to the four quarters of the twentieth century. Each section begins with a contextual essay, followed by an annotated bibliography, followed by selected documents representing women’s experience during each period. The majority of documents are first-person accounts that reveal what women at the time were thinking, talking about, and how they were spending their time. The text is supplemented with fifteen pages of black and white photographs, ranging from Southwestern Telephone switchboard operators in 1910 to National Association for the Advancement of Colored People pickets in 1955 to Governor Ann Richards on her inauguration day in 1991.

Topics cover the range of (mostly) public and (some) private themes that concerned women throughout the twentieth century—from suffrage, to labor activism, to civil rights, to reproductive rights, and to women in politics. The first section, “Social Reform and Suffrage in the Progressive Era, 1900–1920,” deals with suffrage, educational opportunities, labor activism, and private life in a mostly rural environment. The second section, “Post-Suffrage Politics, Depression, and War, 1920–1945,” addresses the details of home and ranch life in an era when 68 percent of the population was rural (61) and how Texas women adapted to the Depression and World War II. The third section, “Conformity, Civil Rights, and Social Protest, 1945–1965,” documents the postwar years with the population shift to an urban environment (by 1960, 75 percent of Texans lived in cities) (136), response to the civil rights movement, and emerging voices of African American and Hispanic women. The fourth section, “Feminism, Backlash, and Political Culture, 1965–2000,” rounds out the century with a discussion of organized feminism and its backlash, Chicana activism, reproductive rights, and the eventual cracks in the political glass ceiling.

The supporting documents, selected from both published and unpublished sources, consist of correspondence, interview excerpts, and other personal accounts. OHR readers should be aware that none of the documents are identified specifically as oral histories, though the authors cite some as interviews or extracts from interviews. No mention is made of the oral histories of women at the Baylor University Institute for Oral History, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, or other historical societies scattered throughout Texas.

The source documents not only illustrate historical themes but also offer a fascinating window into communication styles of the time. For example, the first entry is a letter dated 1902 to a Mrs Pennybacker, relating to child labor: “These little victims not only suffer from the close confinement, unsanitary conditions and long hours, but are almost entirely cut off from all opportunities for the acquirement of an education. On Sunday they sleep the lethargic slumber born of physical exhaustion and . . . Knowing, as you do, how ignorance and vice go hand in hand, there is no need to picture to you the sequel to lives begun this way” (38).

The last document is...